The Bible (1966)

The Screen: 'The Bible' According to John Huston Has Premiere:Director Plays Noah in Film at Loew's State Fry's Script Is Limited to Part of Genesis

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: September 29, 1966

THE big motion picture called "The Bible" that Dino de Laurentiis has produced and John Huston has directed from a screenplay by Christopher Fry is actually a mobile illustration of only the first half of the Book of Genesis. So anyone who goes to it expecting to see what its title implies—the whole of the holy Bible—is due for a rude surprise.

It begins with the uproar of Creation, which goes on for perhaps a half hour, and the emergence of Adam and Eve as the first humans, fully grown, cleanly washed and luminously blond. It continues with Eve eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge at the behest of a snake and being cast by the Lord from the Garden of Eden, along with Adam, for disobeying His command.

There's a sequence about Cain and Abel and a long (and by far more entertaining) account of Noah and the ark. Then, after an intermission, there's a curiously baffling bit about the building of the Tower of Babel, and a lengthy, mephitic episode involving Lot in the city of Sodom and fleeing with his daughters and his wife.

The picture ends with the inspirational story of Abraham and Sarah and the terminal cliff-hanging episode of the morbid and aborted sacrifice of Isaac, their son.

That's the total range of this huge picture that had its world premiere, after more than four years of creation, at Loew's State last night. So no wonder its prudent merchandisers, wary of a possible charge of deceit, have put the protective words, "in the beginning," beneath the main title—in very fine print.

The next surprise and disappointment is this: For all its size, for all its extravagant production, its extraordinary special effects, its stunning projection on the wide screen (D-150) and its almost three-hour length, "The Bible" is lacking a sense of conviction of God in so much magnitude or a galvanizing feeling of connection in the stories from Genesis.

To be sure, the film is mechanically inventive. The scenes of the formation of the earth—the ecology of Creation—are awesomely evolved out of vast shots of gathering vapors, overwhelming clouds, mightily rushing waters, mountains of molten rock and eventual oceans, plains, giant forests and great fields of sparkling flowers.

The building of the ark is represented in the actual raising of a giant ship-like barn, the interior of which has the appearance of a primitive aircraft carrier's hangar-deck, into which a remarkably busy assortment of animals is packed and stacked. The great, dark city of Sodom is a triumph of the scene-designer's craft and a Walpurgis Night fermentation of Katherine Dunham choreography. The Tower of Babel is a skyscraping construction, the battles among the Canaanites are massive spectacles of desert warfare, and the enactment of the near-mountain is fearful and majestic scenically.

But where is the feel of faith and wonder in so much spectacle, where is the mounting of illusion that this is the consequence of a divine creative will? Certainly it comes not from seeing a naked young man emerge in a slow dissolve from a small mound of lemon-colored dust, while Toshiro Mayuzumi's music groans grotesquely and Mr. Huston's off-screen voice intones. "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him."

Nor does it come from idyllic glimpses of the naked young man and girl (Michael Parks and Ulla Bergryd) ambling mutely through verdant glades, or from wild shots of Cain (Richard Harris) suddenly slaying his astonished brother in a field, again with Mr. Huston narrating what is happening in the words of the St. James's Bible.

It comes, if at all—and only faintly—in the way Mr. Huston plays Noah. (Yes, he plays Noah as well as directs the picture and furnishes the off-screen voice of God). He plays the primordial shipbuilder as a rustic, cloth-robed patriarch—a little bit of a crackpot, a little bit of a clown and a great deal of a man of simple, unswerving faith.

You can almost believe that this old fellow is tuned in on the voice of God, just as you can believe that susceptible children listen to Peter Pan. And when Noah shepherds his family together to build the freakish ark marshals the circus parade of animals into the hangar-deck (digressing to hurry up the turtles or to gawk in wonder at the giraffes) or busies himself with the burdens of keeping the animals fed, you do feel a certain spiritual presence and sense the meaning of trust in the Lord.

Likewise, there is a feel of fervor in the stern-faced intensity with which George C. Scott brings the patriarchal person of Abraham to the screen. But his is a chill, forbidding figure, egocentric and aloof, without warmth even in his concubinal encounter with the handmaiden, Hagar (Zoe Sallis), or in his biological discussions with Sarah, his wife. Mr. Scott and Ava Gardner play the couple as though they were posing for monuments.

Something warm and mysterious comes, however, from the brief dialogic scene in which Abraham is visited by the Three Angels, all played symbolically by Peter O'Toole. From this confrontation comes the strongest feeling in the film of human minds searching for answers in the mystical presence of God.

But there's too little of this in the picture, and that's the fault of the script by Mr. Fry. It relies upon literal enactments and the sheer sonority of holy writ. And when it tries for a bit of commentary, such as having Lot's wife turn to salt on looking back on the destruction of Sodom and seeing a rising atomic mushroom cloud, the significance of the symbolism is puzzling, if not imponderable. (I wonder if Mr. Fry is truly saying what my cynical mind guesses he is?)

Anyhow, the misfortune of "The Bible" is that it does not live up to hopes. It does not employ the cinema medium to create a true 20th-century iconography. It simply repeats in moving pictures what has been done with still pictures over the centuries. That is hardly enough to adorn this medium and engross sophisticated audience.